Counties have to ask if some voters are dead

Updated 11:52 pm, Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Election administrators across Texas are coping with a new state list that suggests — in a number of cases, erroneously — that tens of thousands of voters should have their registration canceled because they are presumed dead.

The list, developed by the secretary of state's office to comply with a state law approved last year, has prompted many complaints in at least two big counties that used it to send letters to voters who turned out to be very much alive.

Officials in a couple of other big counties — including Bexar — said they staved off such an onslaught by culling the state list for their counties before sending letters.

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“When we worked the list, we found some were fathers and sons with the same name and the son did not use a suffix,” said Jacquelyn Callanen, Bexar County elections administrator, citing one example of a discrepancy after her office compared the state list with other records.

Rich Parsons, a spokesman for Secretary of State Hope Andrade, said the state office provided Bexar County with more than 6,000 names as a result of matching the Social Security Administration's master death file against the voter registration list, as outlined in the new state law.Each county is asked to verify the voter's status before canceling the registration. Each county determines whether a letter should be sent to all on the list.

Callanen said her office got the total down to 600 names after an analysis.

About 72,800 voters statewide have received or will receive letters telling them records suggest they may be dead and that they must act within 30 days to stay on the rolls.

Officials said, however, that if voters are removed erroneously because they don't reply within 30 days, they will be reinstated and they can vote in November.

The Harris County attorney's office defended Tax Assessor-Collector Don Sumners' decision not to purge presumed-dead voters from the rolls until after the November election, and accused the secretary of state's office of not following the law in providing a list of 9,000 such voters to the county.

In Harris County, “The notice from the secretary of state did not make the required determination that the voters on the list were deceased,” County Attorney Vince Ryan said.

Parsons said the provision requiring the office to verify a voter's death before notifying the counties has been superseded by a more recent law.

The secretary of state's office has long worked to clean the rolls using data from the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Parsons said, and used more stringent criteria to evaluate this first batch of Social Security data.

That didn't stop Dems from raising concerns.

In a letter to Andrade, Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, wrote: “I have grave concerns that very much alive and registered voters — not only in my senatorial district, but across all of Texas — will be disenfranchised as a result of this clearly flawed voter purge.”

The author of the bill requiring the secretary of state to begin using Social Security data to clean the rolls, Rep. Jim L. Jackson, R-Carrollton, said it was a “common-sense” measure. In Tarrant County, elections administrator Steve Raborn said his office got about 4,000 names, but mailed letters to only about 1,800 voters after removing those its staff did not think were matches.

Dee Lopez, Travis County voter registration director, said the number of citizen calls was up to 140, out of about 2,200 letters mailed.

The accuracy of the death master file, which contains 85 million records, has been a repeated issue for Congress and the Social Security Administration, according to the agency's website.